Kiss Me
by theboywiththebread
Summary: High schooler Yao Wang finds himself having to kiss fellow student, Ivan Braginsky, for a drama class play. Can he find a way to get out of it, or does he secretly want to kiss his Russian classmate? RoChu. AU.
1. Pretending

**Author's note: I started writing this story in April - it was going to be a oneshot, but I figured that making it a two- or three-part story and publishing the first chapter would give me more motivation to continue.**

**This will most likely be updated sporadically, as I have another WIP that takes priority over this, but I'll definitely finish this one eventually.**

* * *

Yao put down his pencil and looked at the four other boys who were sitting in a circle on the floor around the notebook he had been writing in. The script that Yao had just finished writing was for a play that they had been tasked with writing for their high school drama class.

Yao had had a dentist appointment that had caused him to miss class on Monday, and on Tuesday he found that the rest of the class had already chosen their groups for the scriptwriting exercise. He had found himself grouped with the four other boys that had been away and missed out on choosing their groups. Aside from Yao, the group included Alfred F. Jones, a popular but not-too-bright jock who had a lot of interesting ideas, Arthur Kirkland, the prim and proper student council president who was the project's resident control freak, Francis Bonnefoy, who had a way with words and was prone to being needlessly difficult just to annoy Arthur, with whom he shared some sort of friendly rivalry, and Ivan Braginsky, who seemed helpful and cheery despite all of the sinister rumours that Yao had heard about him. Although they did argue quite a bit, there was no denying that they worked quickly together, and the final draft of the script was something that they were all very proud of.

"You're done?" asked Arthur.

"I'm done," said Yao.

He had been given the job of writing the whole thing down, since he supposedly had the tidiest handwriting out of the five of them.

"Cool! We're the first group finished!" said Alfred.

The class's teacher, Mr Miller, overheard the American's remark, and wandered over to where the group was sitting.

"You boys finished?" he asked.

"Uh huh," said Yao, holding up the book with the script written neatly on the lined pages.

"Well done, let's hope the other groups are nearly done, because we should be finished with this stage of the project by the end of the period," said Mr Miller.

"What's the next stage? We're performing our plays for the class, right?" asked Arthur.

"Sort of, I'll explain it to everyone tomorrow," said Mr Miller, going back to his desk at the front of the classroom.

It wasn't long before he asked for the class's attention and explained to them that they had to have their scripts finished and ready for class tomorrow, and if need be, they should work on them for homework. Most of the other students groaned, but since Yao's group was finished, none of them minded. They were, however, rather curious about what it was they were going to be doing tomorrow.

"I bet we're going to have to perform it for another class," said Alfred.

"Perhaps we're going to have to film it and learn how to edit the footage properly," suggested Arthur.

"I'm sure whatever we have to do with it will be fun and interesting!" said Ivan.

Yao smiled.

"I bet it will," he said.

He'd noticed that Ivan always seemed nice and cheerful, which contradicted the rumours that Yao had heard about them. Before they had started the group project, Yao had never talked to the Russian boy, but he had heard that he was a cruel and unkind bully. Yao had no idea what Ivan had done to earn that sort of reputation, as he always acted very sweet.

A few minutes later, the bell rang and Mr Miller dismissed the class. Yao picked up his backpack, shoved his notebook and pencil case inside and said goodbye to the others before walking out the door. He wasn't thinking at all about what was going to happen in the next drama class, nor was he particularly curious.

Perhaps he should have been.

* * *

"Did you bring the script?" asked Arthur as soon as Yao walked into the classroom and sat down in his usual spot.

"Of course," said Yao, pulling the notebook out of his bag and setting down on the floor beside him.

"Yay! I wonder what we're going to be doing today," said Ivan, who was lying on his stomach, resting his head on his hands and his elbows on the floor.

"When everyone else arrives, Mr Miller will probably tell us, unless he's decided to do something completely different on a whim like he always does," said Arthur.

It wasn't long before the rest of the students arrived in class, including Alfred and Francis, who made a beeline for the corner where the rest of the group were sitting.

When most of the class was present, aside from one or two people who were probably absent from school, Mr Miller got up and told the class to hush.

"Now, I'm hoping you've all finished the scripts I've told you to write, because today you're going to start practicing them, and in a week, you'll perform them in front of the class. But there's a twist — you're not going to be performing your own plays, you're going to swap your script with another group and perform theirs," he explained.

Most of the class groaned — they'd gone to so much trouble perfecting their scripts, and now they weren't actually going to perform them. Mr Miller went around the class collecting the students' notebooks, paper and whatever else they had written their scripts on, and Yao felt a little apprehensive about giving his away. As well as having the script in it, his notebook also contained all of the other written work he had done during the year, and lots of cute little doodles of pandas and other things that he liked in the margins. Whoever received his script would see all of that, so he hoped that it was given to someone nice who wouldn't make fun of it.

He looked around the classroom at the other groups, wondering which one had written the script that he would have to perform. Perhaps it would be his brother Kiku's group, which also included the Japanese boy's close friend Heracles, the Turkish boy that he sometimes talked to and two others that Yao didn't really know. Maybe they would get the play written by the group that included Antonio, Lovino and the three other kids they often hung out with, or perhaps it would be Tino and Berwald's group of pale, Northern European friends.

Eventually Mr Miller came back and handed Yao a script. This one wasn't written in a notebook but on several A4 sheets of paper that had been neatly stapled together. Whoever had written it had taken the time to type it up on a computer and print it out.

"Let me see that," said Arthur, taking the script from Yao's hands.

"Who wrote it?" asked Francis.

Arthur opened the script to the first page and paused for a moment to read.

"Ludwig, Feliciano, Gilbert, Roderich and Elizaveta," he replied.

"Cool, what's it about?" asked Alfred.

"I don't know, I haven't read it yet. If you'll all shut up for a moment, I'll be able to read through it and tell you," said Arthur.

Arthur went back to his reading, and after a while he commented on it again.

"Okay, one of the characters is a girl, so I guess we'll have Yao play her," he said.

"Why me?" Yao asked indignantly.

"Because you look the most like a girl, of course," said Arthur, not looking up from the page.

"It's because of my hair, isn't it? Francis has long hair too, you know. Why don't you get him to play the girl?" asked Yao.

"It's not just your hair, Yao, you actually look quite feminine, in case you hadn't noticed," said Arthur, "besides, Francis has that ridiculous stubble, so he'd make a terrible woman."

"Hey! It's not ridiculous, it's _mature _and _sexy_, and besides, if anyone has ridiculous hair on their face, it would probably be a certain person with enormous eyebrows," said Francis.

"Excuse me, there is nothing wrong with my eyebrows!" said Arthur.

"Guys, can you shut up? Just let Arthur read the thing so we can get started," said Alfred.

"Yes, good, Alfred actually made a rational suggestion for once," said Arthur, picking the script up and resuming reading it.

"What do you mean _for once_?" Alfred asked.

As the three of them bickered, Yao sighed and turned to Ivan.

"Do you think I look like a girl?" he asked.

Ivan hesitated.

"Well, if you look like a girl, she would be a very pretty girl indeed," he said, smiling shyly at Yao.

"Huh. I don't know if that's supposed to be a compliment or not," said Yao. He didn't like being called feminine or girlish, but Ivan had basically said that he looked nice, which he supposed was a good thing.

"Of course it was a compliment, silly Yao," said Ivan.

"Ha, Yao's character has to kiss somebody," said Arthur, who had decided to ignore Alfred and Francis and go back to reading the script.

"What? No! I don't want to kiss anyone," Yao protested.

"You can kiss me if you want," said Francis.

"I'm not going to kiss you!" said Yao.

"What a crushing rejection. That really hurt my feelings, Yao," Francis said sarcastically, "but if you don't want to kiss me, then who will it be, huh?"

"None of you! I don't want to kiss anyone!" said Yao.

"But if you had to choose, who would it be?" asked Alfred.

"Stop pestering Yao," said Ivan, "he doesn't have to do anything that he doesn't want to do, especially not in front of an audience."

"Yeah, but—"

"Stop arguing, we have to sort out the rest of the parts. Can any of you play the piano?" asked Arthur, looking up from the script once more.

"I can," said Yao.

He'd stopped learning a few years ago, but he hadn't completely forgotten how to do it, and hopefully it would mean he'd get to play a character that wasn't a girl who had to kiss somebody.

"You're already a character. Can anyone who _isn't_ Yao play the piano?" asked Arthur.

"I guess I can, sort of," said Ivan.

"Well, sort of will have to be good enough. Okay, Ivan, you're the one who's going to kiss Yao," said Arthur.

"What? No! I never agreed to that!" exclaimed Yao.

"The character that you have to kiss plays the piano in another scene. Since Ivan can apparently play the piano to some extent, and since you're the only one out of the group who can pass for a girl, then it makes sense for you to play those characters. Please, Yao, it just has to be a peck on the lips, you don't have to shove your tongue down his throat or anything," said Arthur.

He said it as if it were such a simple thing that barely even mattered, but it mattered a great deal to Yao. He couldn't kiss Ivan, and he especially couldn't kiss Ivan in front of the class; it would be embarrassing, people would laugh, and they would think that he _liked_ Ivan.

"Ivan, say something. Surely you don't want to have to do this," said Yao.

The Russian boy shrugged.

"I don't really mind. It's just a kiss," he said.

"It's not _just a kiss_. It'll be embarrassing and everyone will laugh at me! I don't want to waste my first kiss on some stupid high school play that I don't even want to do," said Yao.

"Well… I've never kissed anyone before either, but I don't really mind," said Ivan, moving closer to Yao so that the others couldn't hear him, "I guess it's because I doubt anyone would ever actually want to kiss me, so I don't care if my first kiss isn't special."

"Oh," said Yao.

He felt a little bad for rejecting Ivan, even though he probably wouldn't have cared about doing the same to any of the others. Yao wondered to himself why that was.

"Why do you think nobody would want to kiss you?" asked Yao.

Ivan shrugged.

"I'm just not a very nice person. People don't even like me as a friend, so there's no way that anyone would want to kiss me," he said.

"Well… we've never really talked, but you seem really nice from what I've seen in class, so I don't know why you'd think that you're not a nice person," said Yao.

It was true — Ivan seemed very sweet. He didn't talk as much as the others, but Yao guessed that he was probably just a little bit shy.

Ivan shook his head.

"I'm not nice. You know, when I first came to this school, I had some friends, but… I was really mean to them, and now they're not my friends any more," he said.

That surprised Yao — Ivan seemed like such a nice person, Yao didn't think he had it in him to be cruel.

"People can change, though. Just because you used to act in a certain way doesn't mean you're still like that. I mean, I used to—"

"Can the two of you _please_ pay attention," said Arthur.

"Fine," said Yao.

He _wasn't_ agreeing to kiss Ivan, but he couldn't be bothered arguing any longer. Maybe if he actually read the script, he'd be able to figure out a way to take the kissing scene out. Surely Mr Miller would be fine with that — after all, he doubted that the school would want to risk complaints for the parents of a student who was being forced to kiss someone against their will.

"Alright, let's all go through the script together and then perhaps we can come to some agreement," said Arthur.


	2. To Find a Friend

**Sorry for taking so long to write this chapter. I wish I could promise you that the next one won't take so long, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Thanks for being so patient, though!**

**Oh, and kudos to those of you who noticed the little bit of implied AusHun in the last chapter.**

* * *

"It's not working," said Ivan, poking the printer with a gloved finger.

Mere moments ago, it had been printing the fourth copy of the script that Arthur had gone to the trouble of typing up, but partway through the second page, it had given up.

"No, I guess not," said Yao.

The first three copies had printed fine, and Arthur, Alfred and Francis had taken them back to the Drama classroom. Yao and Ivan had stayed behind in the school library to wait for the rest to print.

"I'll ask the librarian if she knows what's wrong," said Ivan.

The Russian wandered over to the librarian's desk, Yao trailing behind.

"Uh… the printer's not working," he said timidly.

"It's probably out of ink; it was running low before," said the librarian, not bothering to turn around.

"Can you put more ink in?" Ivan asked.

"No, we don't have any more. Our last order hasn't arrived yet, you'll have to print whatever it is at home," she said.

"Okay," said Ivan, turning to Yao.

"Arthur left his account with the document on it logged in," said the Chinese boy, gesturing to the computer monitor which was still displaying the script, "have you got a printer at home? If you do, we can email it to your computer and then you can bring both copies to school tomorrow."

Ivan nodded.

"Won't you need to study it tonight, though?" he asked.

Yao shrugged.

"I guess, but my laptop isn't hooked up to a printer and dad won't let anyone use his work computer. I can wait," he replied.

"Don't be silly. Come over to my place after school! We can print the script and then you can take it home with you," said Ivan.

"Really? I don't want to be any trouble—"

"You won't be. My parents don't get home from work until late, and my big sister would love to meet my new friend," said Ivan.

"Friend?" Yao asked, a little surprised. He liked the other boy, but they hadn't talked much before they started working together in class, and Yao had thought that Ivan might be a little offended that the other was so adamant that he was not going to kiss him.

"Sorry, I just meant… well, I don't really have any friends, but I'd been telling my sister that we'd been working together and you'd been nice to me — I know we don't know each other and you probably don't think of me as a friend, but—"

"No, Ivan, I can be your friend. I just didn't really think you thought of me like that since the only thing you really know about me is that I really don't want to kiss you — and that's not because it's you, it's just because… yeah, no, we're friends," said Yao.

Ivan smiled.

"Do you need to call home at lunch to ask your parents if you can come over? I'll go to the school office if you need to," he said.

"No, I'll just tell my brother to tell them where I've gone. They won't mind," said Yao.

"Okay," said Ivan.

Yao could see that the Russian was excited — it seemed weird that the reason he was so happy was that Yao had agreed to be his friend; the Chinese boy didn't really see why being friends with him would be such a great thing. Still, it was nice to have Ivan as a friend — aside from a few people that he still kept in touch with from when he'd lived in China, Yao didn't have any friends either.

"Do you want to send the document to yourself? I don't know your email…" said Yao, moving so that Ivan could sit down at the computer.

"Sure," said Ivan, sitting down on the computer chair.

Once the email had been sent, they grabbed their backpacks, which they had left in the library foyer, and scurried back to class. Yao found himself looking forward to the end of the day; instead of going home to study and watch TV, he was actually going to hang out with a friend. Even though the drama project had caused him a lot of stress, he was glad that it was happening because otherwise he never would have gotten close to Ivan.

* * *

Yao was standing in the corridor near Ivan's locker, waiting for the Russian boy to arrive — Ivan had told him that his last class of the day was Physics, which was on the other side of the school from his locker, so he wasn't worried that the other hadn't shown up yet — when Arthur approached him.

"Yao, you wanker, you didn't log out of my computer account," said the Brit. He sounded exasperated but not angry.

"Sorry, I guess we weren't thinking," said Yao. He had been a little distracted, and so had Ivan.

"Yeah, well, someone tried to use my account to look at a lot of a bunch of banned sites and stuff. I got pulled out of Maths and sent to the principal's office, but luckily he believed that it wasn't actually me," said Arthur.

Yao giggled.

"That's actually really funny," he said.

"What's funny?" asked a voice from behind him, and Yao turned around to find that Ivan had arrived.

"We forgot to log out of Arthur's account and someone else ended up doing a bunch of stuff with it," said Yao.

"Funny. Yao, are you ready to go?" asked Ivan.

Yao nodded.

"See ya, Arthur," he said, turning to walk away.

"Where are the two of you going?" Arthur called after them.

"To Ivan's place," said Yao, looking back over his shoulder at the other boy, "we've got to print the script there because the library printer is out of ink."

"Right. Have fun," said Arthur, waving goodbye to Ivan and Yao.

"Are we walking to your house?" asked Yao, trying to keep up with Ivan's long strides.

"No, my sister picks me up from school. She gets out of work around this time," said the Russian, slowing down a little so that Yao could walk alongside him.

"Oh, cool. How old is your sister?" he asked.

"My big sister is twenty four, and my little sister is eleven," Ivan explained, "what about you? What's your family like?"

"Uh, I'm the oldest, and I have a lot of siblings. They're not all related to me, though, not really," said Yao.

His family was complicated to say the least, and it was always a pain to explain it to people — not that many people asked.

"So, uh, what do your parents do?" asked Yao, trying to make small talk.

"My dad's a builder and my mom is a nurse," said Ivan, "what about yours?"

"My dad's a lawyer," said Yao as the two of them walked out of the school.

"Oh, cool," said Ivan.

They walked in silence for a little while until Ivan stopped at a car parked not far from the school. He poked his head through the open window and said something in Russian to the young woman sitting inside. The woman said something in reply, and then Ivan turned back to Yao.

"Anastasiya says that it's okay for you to come over for the afternoon," said Ivan, opening the back door of the car and gesturing for the Chinese boy to get in.

"Does she not speak English?" Yao asked quietly.

"I speak English," said Ivan's sister, her accent a little heavier than her younger brother's, "sorry, we mostly speak Russian together as a family."

"That makes sense. I speak Chinese with my parents a lot, but some of my adopted siblings don't know it so we mostly use English at home," said Yao.

Ivan sat down beside Yao and buckled his seatbelt, smiling at the other boy. Yao had to admit that Ivan had a lovely smile — he looked genuinely happy when he smiled.

"Is there anything else you want to do at my place? I mean, printing the script out won't take long, and I don't mind if you stay for longer. I mean, I'd like it if you were to stay for longer," said Ivan.

Yao shrugged.

"Anything is fine, really," he said, "and yeah, staying for longer would be cool."

"Great!" said Ivan.

Yao smiled. He was looking forward to spending the afternoon with his new friend — though he acted kind of shy at school, the Chinese boy assumed that Ivan would come out of his shell a bit if they were at his own house. Yao liked Ivan a lot, and was glad that they were going to get to know each other.


End file.
